Trump Approval

US Direction

John Zogby is co-author with Joan Snyder Kuhl of the e-book The First Globals: Understanding, Managing, and Unleashing Our Millennial Generation (Spring 2013).

Please find a blog post below about the First Globals that Haley Cohen and Howard Dean published on the Huffington Post.

In the op-ed David Brooks wrote for the New York Times last Friday, he portrayed the millennial generation (which we call First Globals) as a group resistant to idealism and nonplussed by global activism. According to Brooks, young people today are disillusioned by the current system but too wary of untested antidotes to push for alternatives. They feel they must be egocentric to be successful.

By John Zogby as published in The Financialist, a digital magazine sponsored by Credit Suisse. The digital magazine offers fresh commentary on breaking news as well as in-depth reporting on the issues, trends and ideas that drive markets, businesses and economies.

Assuming that we Americans still see ourselves as one nation and indivisible, it is hard to believe that there is a connection between our politics and what voters have actually expressed in recent years. Polling and voter behavior over the past decade and a half shows an electorate that favors change and problem solving. But in the actions of elected officials, we find too little of either.

"This was a holiday week so at least there was an excuse for little action. The stock markets are healthy but GDP growth has slowed. Cyprus is scary and causing some jitters among some in the chattering classes about Russian bullying and financial crisis dominoes toppling. Kim Jong Un says that the Koreas are now officially in a state of war and he must be taken seriously. L'il Kim also threatened retaliation against the U.S. even though North Korea's missiles never get past their own beaches. And the Supreme Court heard arguments about two cases involving gay marriage -- an issue that now leading conservatives have begun to throw in the towel. President Obama made an emotional appeal on gun control but that seemed more for his legacy than for any real accomplishment. All in all, the week was a wash for Mr. Obama."

The nation is divided on so many things: God, guns, gay marriage, Obamacare, the fiscal cliff, abortion, the President's job performance, and optimism. Optimism? Even that. Now on the surface, Americans are feeling better about the next fours than they have in a while: 53% told us in our March 14-15 Zogby Poll that they were "very optimistic" or somewhat optimistic" about "the next four years in America". Four in ten (42%), however, said they were either "very pessimistic" or "somewhat pessimistic".

But what is puzzling - actually troubling - is what this pollster sees in the cross-tabulations. It doesn't appear that optimism or pessimism has that much to do with people's lives and the sense of their own personal future. For starters, if you supported President Obama's re-election, then you are optimistic. If you did not, you are pessimistic. So the real metric here seems to be based on ideology. Thus, 84% of Democrats are optimistic while 28% of Republicans are optimistic. One exception: only 40% of independents are optimistic, 50% are pessimistic. Yet independents voted for Mr. Obama.